Last night was date night and my husband and I went to a recently opened Italian restaurant in Dulwich. The food and service were very good, but the wine list was only OK. So we returned home and opened a bottle of sparkling wine that he had brought back from a trip he took to Brescia earlier in the month - Cavalleri 2005 Collezione Grandi Cru Franciacorte.
I learned something new last night - that not all sparkling wines from Italy are called 'prosecco'. In the Brescia area, the sparkling wines are called 'franciacorte' and there are rules about how they're made and the grapes they contain that make them different from prosecco (i.e. they can't contain pinot grigio grapes). This wine was 100% chardonnay, a blanc de blancs.
Having never tried a franciacorte before, I didn't know what to expect. The wine surprised me right from the start, with a strong yeasty smell emanating from the bottle, followed by the scent of light olive oil. The olive theme carried through in the flavour, with the wine tasting slightly of fresh-off-the-tree green olives followed by a citrus-clean finish. On first pouring the bubbles were fantastic, too, although they did not persist through the end of the glass. Despite this, I would drink this wine again, it was very good.
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